INTRODUCTION

From the letter it's clear that pride in oneself and the same pioneering and optimistic
spirit that drove many Americans across the
vast Western
wilderness was alive and well in the 1930s, even amidst the Great
Depression. However, no amount of optimism would put food on the
American table and men back to work, and for many, neither did the New
Deal. While the search for a solution to the depression
continued rather wax and wane with the New Dealers in
Washington, many of the disaffected men and women
found solace, and even comfort and understanding, in the populist
voices of the
increasingly popular Father Charles Coughlin, Huey
“Kingfish” Long, and Upton Sinclair.

While
this trio of popular men with their populist platforms have
been
studied studied
severally, and with Coughlin and Long often appearing linked together
as if they were allies, they represent a single phenomena of 1930s
Depression-era America: a popular populist voice for the
disaffected. Further, they each had
regional answers to poverty and joblessness, as well as
criticisms of the New Deal, yet they each yearned of taking these ideas
to
the national level to solve Depression-era woes. Each felt
that both locally and nationally
all of the wealth was concentrated with a wealthy few, and that this
wealth
should be distributed equitably among the masses. Each also formed a
political organization to further espouse their ideas on a more
national level. Each, despite their noble efforts,
were dogged by criticism that their ideas rebelled against
traditional democratic values and the role of capitalism in a free
society, and critics often applied
labels such as Fascist, Communist, and Socialist, to their ideas and to
the men themselves. And, finally, each man was squelched in the
end. This is the story of the these three men and their voices
of populism as voices for the disaffected during the 1930s. Let's begin.